The Foreign Service Journal, September 2006

short of city codes, lacks sprinklers, is filled with asbestos and is, in most respects, the most hazardous workplace in town. But the only government not fully supporting the [renovation] project is the U.S. Too much unchecked U.N.-bashing and stereotyping over too many years — manifest in a fear by politicians to be seen to be supporting better premises for overpaid, corrupt U.N. bureaucrats — makes even refurbishing a building a political hot potato. Making Reform Work One consequence is that, like the building itself, the vital renewal of the organization, the updating of its mis- sion, its governance and its management tools, is addressed only intermittently. And when Washington does champi- on the right issues like management reform, as it is cur- rently doing, it provokes more suspicion than support. Last December, for example, largely at American insis- tence, instead of a normal two-year budget, member states approved only six months’ worth of expenditure — a period which ended on June 30. Developing and devel- oped countries, the latter with the U.S. at the fore, are now at loggerheads over whether sufficient reform has taken place to lift that cap, or indeed whether there should be any links between reform and the budget. Without agreement, we could face a fiscal crisis very soon. There has been a significant amount of reform over the last 18 months, from the creation of a new Ethics Office and whistleblower policy, to the establishment of a new Peacebuilding Commission and Human Rights Council. But [that is] not enough. The unfinished management reform agenda, which the U.S. sensibly supports, is in many ways a statement of the obvious. It argues that systems and processes designed 60 years ago for an organization largely devoted to running conferences and writing reports simply don’t work for today’s operational U.N., which conducts multi- billion-dollar peacekeeping missions, humanitarian relief operations and other complex operations all over the world. The report sets out concrete proposals for how this can be fixed while also seeking to address the broader management, oversight and accountability weaknesses highlighted by the “oil-for-food” program. One day soon, we must address the massive gap between the scale of world issues and the limits of the institutions we have built to address them. However, today even relatively modest proposals that in any other organization would be seen as uncontroversial, such as providing more authority and flexibility for the secretary- general to shift posts and resources to organizational pri- orities without having to get direct approval frommember states, have been fiercely resisted by the G-77 (the main group of developing countries) on the grounds that this weakens accountability. Hence the current deadlock. What lies behind this? It is not because most developing countries don’t want reform. To be sure, a few spoilers do seem to be opposed to reform for its own sake, and there is no question that some countries are seeking to manipulate the process for their own ends with very damaging consequences. But in practice, the vast majority are fully supportive of the prin- ciple of a better-run, more effective U.N.; indeed, they know they would be the primary beneficiaries, through more peace and more development. So why has it not so far been possible to isolate the rad- icals and build a strong alliance of reform-minded nations to push through this agenda? I would argue that the answer lies in questions about motives and power. Very unfortunately, there is currently a perception among many otherwise quite moderate countries that anything the U.S. supports must have a secret agenda aimed at either subordinating multilateral processes to Washington’s ends or weakening the institu- tions, and therefore, put crudely, should be opposed with- out any real discussion of whether it makes sense or not. As for power, in two different ways that revolves around perceptions of the role and representativeness of the Security Council. First, there has been a real, under- standable hostility by the wider membership to the per- ception that the Security Council, in particular the five permanent members, is seeking a role in areas not for- mally within its remit, such as management issues or human rights. Second, there has been an equally understandable conviction that those five veto-wielding permanent mem- bers, who happen to be the victors in a war fought 60 years ago, cannot be seen as representative of today’s world — even when looking through the lens of financial contribu- tions. Indeed, the so-called G-4 of Security Council aspi- rants — Japan, India, Brazil and Germany — contribute twice as much as the P-4, the four permanent members excluding the U.S. British Prime Minister Tony Blair acknowledged exact- ly this point on his trip to Washington [in May], and it is F O C U S 58 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 6